As the small aircraft in which she was
flying plummeted to Earth nearly a
decade ago, Robin Holleran thought her
life was about to end. Instead, a new
adventure began for this Mendham resident and single mother of three.

After recovering from a broken back,
Holleran, now 54, stumbled upon a
private Facebook group of airline crash
survivors and their harrowing stories.

She was intrigued.

“In 2011, I began to think that these
firsthand accounts might be worth
sharing in a book,” says Holleran.

“Some survivors agreed to be inter-viewed, some didn’t. It’s a personaldecision because many have post-traumatic stress.”One year later, Holleran suffered astroke (unrelated to the crash) and putthe book on hold. But last summer, LindyPhilip, the founder of the Facebooksupport group, contacted Holleran andpersuaded her to resume the project.

The duo sent proposals to 15 publish-ers. “One response included a contract,
so our project quickly became an exercise in speed writing—we had to deliver
a 200-page manuscript within just a few
months,” Holleran says.

She did the writing as Philip, a Vancouver native, helped with research, interviews and online marketing. Skyhorse
Publishing issued the book, Bracing for
Impact, last month.

The work, which profiles 16 sur-vivors of commercial-airline andsmall-plane crashes, includes accountsby Holleran, her father and brother(who each survived a separate planecrash); a LynyrdSkynryd crewmember wholived to tell thetale of his ill-fated flight withthe iconic 1970sband; and ev-eryday peoplewho walkedaway from theunimaginablewith a new takeon life. ■ ILLUSTRATION:JAMESO’BRIEN

[ H E A L T H ] BY TAMMY LA GORCE

Good News About Bad News

“EVERYBODY SEEMS TO HAVE A story
about a doctor who told them tragic
news but failed to do it the right way,”
says Dr. Anthony Orsini, founder of
the nonprofit Breaking Bad News
Foundation.

Telling families awful, hard-to-fathom medical realities “is often done
too abruptly, because the doctor just
wants to get it over with,” says Orsini,
a neonatologist who practiced at the
Goryeb Children’s Hospital at Morristown Medical Center and lived in
North Caldwell before moving to
Orlando, Florida, last year.

When Orsini started seeing patients
in 1997, he was determined not to be
a cold-hearted clinician. “The idea of
breaking [tragic] news scared me,” he
says. “I’d watch these difficult interactions every chance I got, and what I
saw was that some doctors were horrible at it, and some did it really well.”
After years of observation, “I thought,

Let’s find out why this physician is goodat it and teach it, so the next generationof physicians are all good at it.”After a dozen years of research,Orsini launched Breaking Bad News in

2010 to teach health care workers how
best to communicate with patients. The
model is now used in more than a dozen
medical training programs. The foundation brings professional actors into hospitals to role-play on video with doctors
tasked with delivering terrible truths.

“It’s improvisational, and we review
the tapes with the physicians right after
the scenes are shot,” Orsini says. “This
way they can actually see the analysis.

It’s one thing to tell someone theirhand gestures were off and another toactually see it for themselves.”The model has branched from Mor-ristown to hospitals in Orlando and Nor-folk, Virginia, with the goal of reachingdoctors and medical centers throughoutthe country. “We’ve already trained wellover 250 physicians,” Orsini says. “Theimpact on the families that benefit ishuge. It’s been more rewarding than Iever imagined.” ■